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Why promote/describe/sell aneutronic fusion, rather than Focus Fusion (or DPF) specifically? Why confuse folks with more details, especially if those aren’t directly relevant?

If the goal is to promote FF, frankly, I would avoid using “nuclear” in headings and taglines. While focus fusion is indeed technically a nuclear process, it’s not fission, which is all the public is really familiar with, and it has almost none of the properties that the general public associates with nuclear energy (nasty, long-lived radioactive waste; risk of serious accidents; risk of proliferation for atomic weapons; huge expensive powerplants, etc. etc. etc.). In this way, labelling it “nuclear” is actually far more confusing and (unintentionally) deceptive.

I’d suggest a heading/tagline like “Focus Fusion — The power of the sun in a box” (or something similar). Emphasize in the poster that fusion is the same process that the sun and stars use, and emphasize that Focus Fusion is/will be extremely efficient, producing electricity directly rather than by producing heat to boil water to create steam to turn a turbine to spin a generator, like most conventional powerplants do. This also means that FF generators will be much more compact than most (all?) other forms of electricity generation, and will be easily portable, enabling uses that are currently very expensive. And talk about expense, or lack thereof, how much cheaper FF will be, and how its fuel is (almost) limitless and costs practically nothing.

If you want, mention that it produces no ongoing waste and very little radiation (I’d actually be curious to calculate how much radiation would be associated with a FF device as compared against that emitted by burning coal, as I bet FF comes out ahead).

Perhaps I’m missing something as to the purpose of a poster on aneutronic fusion in general, though, so I apologize if the above is off-target.

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Rezwan, who is the audience for these posters? It may be pessimistic of me, but I don’t believe the general public has enough background knowledge to grasp the issues at hand in the space of a poster (or, quite frankly, the interest). Is this material intended for a more specific audience, like potential investors or regulators?

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I guess my question was more basic — what is it about higher pressures that makes a pinch harder to achieve?

And is it a big issue to run vacuum equipment? I would think that kind of tech is very well developed and close to off-the-shelf — am I incorrect? Does it add a lot of complexity to the gear?

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Ferret wrote: how do we make the bomb with the help of the Sun? 🙂

Dumping about 10 solar masses into it will produce a doozie of an explosion…

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I had understood that the overwhelmingly primary purpose of the NIF is warhead reliability research, and that even if they get over-unity, there really is no obvious practical path from its setup to fusion power plants. Is that correct?

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Why doesn’t the pinch occur at higher pressure?

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Very nice re-organization, Rezwan — everything is laid out much more clearly! Good job!

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Can anyone translate the paper into lay terms? Or, alternatively, what does this mean for how close Tri-Alpha might be?

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So could we get away with, what, two shipping containers for a fully self-contained DPF installation? Or would the cooling and transformers require more space than that?

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Correct me if I’m wrong, but the critical part of the capacitor for DPF fusion is the switches, and not the capacitors per se. Smaller capacitors might be a bit cheaper, but they wouldn’t help with the most important part.

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vansig wrote: Can we turn the way-back dial even farther back, and use only parts that were available to Benjamin Franklin?

Those would be some massive Leyden jars, unless you only want to do shots during a thunderstorm.

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Rezwan wrote: It could sell itself, and it could also be crushed by nefarious forces of anticompetition.

To be honest, that seems a bit paranoid to me. The underlying technology is actually fairly simple, and if it’s successful the competitive advantage would be so huge that it is hard to imagine some company or organization picking it up.

Eric has said quite often that he anticipates a fight for recognition even if it works. There will be skepticism and need for several rounds of verification.

And after the debacle of cold fusion, and the generally association of fusion with huge multi-billion dollar projects, that is not at all surprising, and indeed, given the extraordinary claim of fusion with this kind of hardware, one would want there to be careful verification. But again, if LPP can demonstrate over-unity production of electricity from the device, there is no question that it will be adopted, and extremely quickly. It has far too many advantages not to, and the tech is simple enough to be essentially “unsuppressable”. Once it is demonstrated, almost any reasonable sized lab should be able to reproduce it.

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While I’m all for people participating however they choose, it seems to me that a simple announcement of breakeven from LPP will do far more for the issue than any amount of advertising and advocacy by FFS. And once LPP can demonstrate above-unity production of energy, funding should be far easier to come by. I personally don’t see the purpose of doing a lot of advocacy, which at best can have a long-term effect, prior to the demonstration that the technology actually works, and once that is demonstrated, I would think it would sell itself without the need for a lot of other promotion.

Just my two cents, of course.

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What is the purpose of “advertising” at this point? It seems to me of questionable value to promote aneutronic fusion at this stage of the game, as I’m not clear what the “ask” is, what action you want people to take. I would think that what is needed far more is hard dollars invested in the research, but that isn’t going to come from the general public (and presumably is better handled by LPP than the FFS).

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Slightly off topic, and I’m sure this has been addressed before, but how much helium would a commercial FF unit produce? Would it be enough to be worth collecting and selling, especially given the forecast shortage of helium?

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